More Silver Age Love Triangle Action [Spoilers for Avengers 114-128]

Now, I dug into the longboxes again for this one. I hate going into the longboxes in the winter. It's cold. They're heavy. But the search is always worthwhile.

I had so much fun looking once again at FF #132 (see a couple of posts ago) that I decided to dig into the Avengers box for some real early-70s comic book soap opera. This one took place at around the same time (1973). The poor fellow having his heart ripped to shreds this time? The Swordsman.

The Swordsman got his start back in the sixties, as primarily a Hawkeye villain--he had more or less mentored the young Hawk in his carnival days, and only later revealed himself to be a crook. He had battled the Avengers a while back. Now, however...well, here's my problem. He joined up with the Avengers in issue #114. My collection of Avengers starts with issue #115 (with a few scattered earlier issues). I don't actually know how it came about that he became an Avenger, not really. From what I was able to glean, he had continued with his criminal ways for quite a while, and then met a young woman, Mantis, who had convinced him to reform. The Avengers have a history of giving a second chance to super-powered not-quite-heroes, so there's nothing unbelievable about this. Mantis, who accompanied him, was a highly skilled martial arts expert who possessed a number of other, more mysterious powers as well.

So, all well and good, the former villain has been saved by the love of a good woman, just like in countless novels and movies before. I don't think this would fly today (witness my own reactions to the recent Black Adam/Isis interactions in 52) but in 1973 the ten-year-olds weren't looking far beyond the surface and I certainly bought the premise.



Here are the Swordsman and Mantis, the happy couple, shortly after their arrival at Avengers Mansion. Did I mention that these two had one of the most dysfunctional, codependent relationships in the entire Marvel Universe? Because they did. And here they are, helpfully encapsulating the weakly-rooted origin of their relationship. The Swordsman loves Mantis because she helped him to become a better man, gave him something to lean on when he needed it (which, as you'll see, was most of the time). She provides for him not only a moral compass but the strength that should come from within. As for Mantis, all she wants is "a strong, heroic man." One wonders about this, given that Mantis herself has a great deal of personal power and skill, but there you go--she needs to feel protected and safe. And while there is a definite interdependency, it's clear even at this point in the story that she does not need him as he needs her. (Please note a small indication of his jealousy/insecurity in the first panel.)



And above we see the beginning of the end for these two. The Swordsman, in true John Wayne fashion (seriously, I've seen John Wayne do this in a movie), has played the tough guy and ignored a potentially serious injury until this point--where he collapses and is carried of by Mantis to rest until his injury heals. Now, if this happened in a comic now, I wouldn't think much about it (apart from a quick "what an idiot!"). Thirty years ago, and particularly given the nature of the relatinship between Swordsman and Mantis? She wants a strong man. In this moment, he is no longer that. The fact that it is Mantis herself who is carrying him underlines a disparity in their power. Not that Mantis herself sees it this way at this point--but it's there, a visual cue, for the reader.

While the Swordsman is recovering, Mantis and the other Avengers (although she was not herself a member at this time, she helped out quite a bit) go off to battle against the crime cartel Zodiac. Their schtick was that each member dressed up like a sign of the Zodiac (Aries as a ram, Leo as a lion, and so forth). Although Mantis made an excellent showing, she was eventually defeated and thrown from a roof. Her saviour is the Vision, and she is damned impressed with him:



The Swordsman, sidelined from the battle due to his own injuries, is beside himself with worry. The Vision does not help matters with his comments here:



Is something going on here? wonders the Swordsman. Well, no, at least not from the Vision's point of view. He is in love with Wanda, and that's all there is to that. But the Vision is new to human interaction, and even if he were not, the Swordsman's irrational jealousy wouldn't be something he would take into consideration when praising a teammate's skill and valor as he does here. (The Swordsman doesn't know that Mantis herself has developed an appreciation for the android. His reaction here is based entirely on his own feelings.)

However, he will have no doubts about Mantis's own interests after he sees this:



There's a lot of action in these books as well, but I'm not writing about it here other than to put some of the soap into context. The Avengers continue to battle Zodiac. A member of Zodiac, Libra, jumps ship, revealing himself to be the father of Mantis and telling a long, sad tale of her life up to this point. Mantis is enraged--her own memories are of a happy childhood, not one in which her mother was tragically killed. She attacks Libra, and when the Avengers try to stop her she beats the crap out of them. Even Thor. Finally she is restrained by Libra himself.

Just then the Swordsman, who has overheard Libra's story and is desperate to redeem himself for his perceived weakness in Mantis' eyes, takes a plane and goes off after the man who killed her mother:



This...does not go as well as he might have hoped:



In fact, at this point the Swordsman pretty much melts into a big puddle of emo. I remember, as a child, feeling tremendously sorry for him, even though I'm sure I didn't grasp the entirety of his situation.



Honestly, from here on in it's all downhill. The Swordsman recovers his strength and attempts to function as an Avenger, but so overwhelmed is he with the inevitable loss of Mantis that he can barely hold it together enough to do his heroing, picking fights with the Vision in the middle of battle:



The Vision is, again, clueless. And now poor Wanda is brought into the mix:



Pretty soon Avengers mansion is filled with the expectation of loss, with angst, with fear, with smoldering glances, and no one can get any work done:




And yes, the Silver Age Vision (much as I adore him) could be a real dick. He has, obviously, no idea of how to handle this development. It's hard enough for him to deal with the relatively straightforward (if in many ways problematic) relationship he and Wanda share. There's no way he is able to comprehend the twisted dynamic of the relationship of the Swordsman and Mantis, into which he and Wanda have been drawn through no fault of their own. He doesn't understand why Wanda is so upset--understandable--and he's not all that interested in why. Granted that she is trying to have a big relationship talk in the middle of a battle:



For his part, the Swordsman is digging his hole deeper and deeper. He can see the writing on the wall, and he has no idea what to do to regain Mantis' love, which is so obviously slipping away:



She has decided that he can no longer give her what she believes she needs (a strong, self-sufficient man), and is thus no longer willing to give him what he needs from her.

---

Now, I don't remember this next bit from way back when I first read it, but I liked it quite a bit this time. Wanda has just been offered magical training by Agatha Harkness, and has jumped at the opportunity. Although she has been concerned about the Vision and Mantis, she doesn't let that distract her from her work:



Since Wanda was historically someone without a lot of focus--due in part, I'm sure, to the very arbitrary nature of her mutant hex power (what could it do? whatever the writers needed it to do) so it's nice to see, here, her trying to take charge of her own abilities, and giving that priority over relationship issues.

Meanwhile, other Avengers are more concerned with purely personal matters, as Mantis finally makes her break with the Swordsman:



and he, devastated, falls apart entirely. Mantis, for her part, having made up her mind, moves quickly...







...but to no avail. The Vision is not interested, and tells her so in no uncertain terms.



Go Vision! I knew it all the time.

---

Back to the action, the Avengers are attacked by Kang, who starts off the Celestial Madonna Saga by kidnapping not only every woman in the mansion (that would be Mantis, the Scarlet Witch, and Agatha Harkness) but all the men as well.

All but one:



Yeah, you know you're pathetic when even supervillains don't think you're worth their while.

But the Swordsman would get his chance. He's contacted by Agatha Harkness, who instructs him on how to reach the captive Avengers in Egypt. In a pyramid, of course. And he tries, he really does, but--at this point--he is still not making the best of impressions. He breaks into the pyramid easily enough, due to past experience as a tomb robber, but when he is confronted with the dangers within it, his emotional state catches up with him:






He stumbles his way through passages, somehow finding himself near Kang. What luck! But just when he's about to blast Kang with his sword, he is stopped by--Rama-Tut. End of story.

I say "end of story" because, well, I'm missing the next part. It was in Giant Size Avengers 2, which I lack. I did, however, take a quick look in Wikipedia, from which I learned that he dies saving Mantis from Kang, at which point she realizes (of course) that she really does love him after all, and redeems himself, and all that good stuff.

There are a few things that struck me about this story during the rereading.

First is how much I dislike the character of Mantis. I don't think even the ten-year-old me was that enthralled with her, since I thought she was pretty mean (although she had easily the best powers of any woman I'd seen up to that point), but now? Manipulative, self-centered, willing to break up not only her own relationship but someone else's in order to get what she wants, she's portrayed very negatively. She destroyed the Swordsman. And yet she was firmly on the side of the heroes. How often--thirty years ago--did we see someone not a villain whose character was so unlikable?

Second has to do with how damned stereotypical Mantis' character is. She's Asian, therefore she knows martial arts, has awareness beyond the understanding of Western folk, and is basically inscrutable. (Granted that we later learn that she was in fact trained by the Kree, but the point still stands.) She possessed a number of gender-stereotypical characteristics as well--the deference to the Swordsman, the stated need for "a strong man." Although I'm not sure how deep those went, she certainly displayed an abhorrance and scorn for a man who was not stereotypically strong, brave and heroic, equally as unrealistic, and certainly equally as disastrous for the Swordsman who tried to live up to her ideals in order to keep her..

Third is how fully the younger me bought into the notion that it was at all appropriate for either one of these people to be so responsible for the other's well-being. The notion of being saved by "the love of a good woman" (and destroye by its loss)? Not until we saw the results of that utter dependency, the weakness and incapacity born of drawing all of one's strength from another person, did I as a kid realize that there was something fundamentally wrong there. That was, I think, a pretty big thing to do in a comic in 1973--to write against the common ideal in that way.